The Spectator assesses the queen on her impending 80th birthday. And just a few days earlier, Margaret Thatcher, who entered her ninth decade just a few months before the queen, was in Washington for the funeral of Ronald Reagan's defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger.

Which reminded me of what I always thought would have been the feminist picture of the century: Her Majesty the Queen asking the Hon. Margaret Thatcher to form a government. Yet feminists, of course, never liked Thatcher. Even though she was a woman who worked her way up the political ladder to become Prime Minister of Great Britain - no husband's coat-tails for her, like so many women in politics - even though she let little girls across the UK know that they could aspire to high office, she was a conservative and thus her achievement was not to be celebrated.

Gloria Steinem once called Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison a "female impersonator" and said "Having someone who looks like us, but thinks like them is worse than having no one." That was the typical feminist attitude toward Thatcher. But like it or not, Thatcher advanced the cause of women in politics immensely by becoming the beloved leader of conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, she ranks second only to Ronald Reagan in the conservative pantheon. Conservatives may still not favor forced gender equality or economically loony ideas like "comparable worth," but they know that women can be stronger and smarter than men in public office.

A few conservative feminists get it. If feminism is about equal rights and equal opportunity, and the notion that women are as capable as men, then Thatcher's career was a feminist triumph. And I suppose, if you like monarchy and all that, Queen Elizabeth has also proven just as capable as her male predecessors.